One, your add-ons are linked to your Google account. So if you download a new version of Chrome or install an add-on on one of your devices, when you log in to your Google account in Chrome on another device, the browser will automatically download and install those add-ons or updates. Two, the Chrome version of an add-on frequently has more work put into the user interface. That matters if you're logging in and out of LastPass all day. Plus, Chrome's task manager access it by pressing Shift-Esc breaks down how much RAM and CPU power each add-ons is using, so you can identify ones that may be causing issues with browser performance or device battery life.
Firefox has some tools to track add-on performance, but they're not nearly as user-friendly. Great casting support: Casting in Chrome used to require an add-on, but it's now embedded in the browser. If you have a TV with a Chromecast device and it's on the same network as your PC, you can open a Chrome tab on your PC and send it to y0ur television. Or you can cast a streaming video that's embedded on that tab. This is handy for presentations or for watching a video on a big screen. By contrast, for Firefox, only the Android version can stream, it doesn't support as wide a variety of video types, and you can't cast a tab.
Voice search: When you go to Google. Click it to search using your voice, if your computer has an enabled microphone. For most people, this is much faster than typing a search query. Memory usage could be better: It's not unusual for Chrome to use over a gigabyte of RAM, even when you have just a few tabs open that are more or less static.
There are understandable reasons for that -- for one, Chrome has to remember your recently closed tabs so that they can quickly reload on demand. But Chrome does not tend to scale down its usage on devices that have limited amounts of RAM. Resistance to add-ons that download embedded videos: As the owner of YouTube, Google naturally doesn't want people downloading its videos and viewing them without the ads that make it profitable.
But offline viewing is important for people with unreliable connections or who expect to be away from the Internet for an extended period of time. But that only applies to YouTube. If you dig around, you can find a few add0ons that lets you download embedded videos in Chrome, but they all have varying degrees of sketchiness. The most popular browser choice isn't necessarily the best. But despite its issues with RAM usage and limited downloading of embedded videos, Chrome earns its No.
Google Chrome is in the Web Browsers category of the Browsers section. Free YouTube Downloader. IObit Uninstaller. WinRAR bit. Internet Download Manager. VLC Media Player. MacX YouTube Downloader. Microsoft Office YTD Video Downloader. Adobe Photoshop CC. VirtualDJ Avast Free Security. WhatsApp Messenger.
Talking Tom Cat. Clash of Clans. Subway Surfers. TubeMate 3. Google Play. Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer remade.
Spotify removes shuffle button after Adele's request. Cowboy Bebop review. Crypto group loses Constitution auction. After choosing your log-in method, you're asked to read through and accept the EULA. This will only appear for the initial log-in; it won't show up for subsequent uses and users.
Next, you can take a photo of yourself with the Webcam, use a provided icon, or use your current Google account avatar. Gone from previous versions is the mandated Webcam photo. It took our avatar about 30 seconds to synchronize our existing account avatar from the cloud. Chrome then takes anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds to synchronize your Google settings, if any, and then the computer is ready to be used.
There's no doubt that the EULA is annoying, but we've never seen another new, unused operating system start so quickly. Interface Google has clearly spent some serious time developing the new interface. It looks and feels like a personal computer, finally, where before it was little more than a full-screen browser. There's an actual desktop that looks a bit cribbed from Windows 7, with Chrome-the-browser pinned to the far left of the Launcher, and other apps pinned right next to it.
The desktop itself shows only your background by default, but a Tic-Tac-Toe-style icon on the Launcher reveals all your installed apps over the desktop background.
When you install an app, it'll appear here. The lower-right corner shows the time, Internet connection status, battery status, and shows your Google account avatar to indicate who's logged in. Click the avatar to show shutdown options and reveal more information and settings.
You can customize the background with one of several dozen options, or upload your own image. However, it must be either locally stored or in your Google Drive -- it won't pull in an image from a service like Facebook.
All the Settings have been moved to open in their own tabs, but you probably knew this from using Chrome-the-browser. Changes made in the browser tend to be reflected in Chrome OS about a month or so later.
The look of Chrome has changed remarkably little since its surprise debut in September On Chrome OS, the upper-right corner of the browser hosts a square icon and an X. The X is to close the browser window. Drag the box down to minimize the browser, drag it to the edges to "snap" it to the side and make it half the width of your screen, or click it to switch from windowed mode to full-screen mode.
The window snap is another cue taken from Windows 7, but it's a clever and intuitive one, and works well in Chrome. The interface's strongest point is also its weakness. What works well in the browser works well here, but the faults of one are reflected in the other, too. Some controls, such as page zoom, are readily available from the "wrench" options menu. Others, such as the extension manager, are hidden away under a Tools submenu. Hiding essentials like that remains an odd design choice to make.
As is true about every aspect of this operating system, updates are much more likely to tweak the layout and design of the interface. Chrome's extensions are fairly limited in how they can alter the browser's interface. Unlike Firefox, which gives add-on makers a lot of leeway to change the browser's look, Chrome mandates that extensions appear only as icons to the right of the location bar.
The benefit maintains a uniform look in the browser, but it definitely restricts how much the browser can be customized. Even with its limitations, the browser interface design has remained a contemporary exemplar of how to minimize the browser's screen footprint while remaining easy to use and versatile. The new desktop, on the other hand, finally brings to Chrome OS a sense of familiarity that is essential for any new PC experience.
Features Chrome OS isn't quite as reliant on the Internet as it was before, but it's still reasonably crippled without it. This is a vehicle, first and foremost, for leading a Web-based existence. As such, what Chrome OS does is create a space where Web-based applications can function and thrive. The operating system itself doesn't do much -- it's a browser. However, it's a heavily modded browser, and it achieves its main goal of getting you on the Web as fast as possible.
This comes from both the solid-state drive SSD on your Chromebook or Chromebox, and the various optimizations that Google has been building into Chrome. This is where the second bit of genius in the Chrome OS comes in: because everything is Web-based, you can log in to any installation of the operating system and instantly have all of your apps, settings, and other personalizations at your fingertips.
That's still an incredible feat. It's an important one, too, as Chrome OS improves with each regular iteration of the operating system. In Chrome OS's first year, it updated eight times. Things that were buggy originally, such as touch pad support on the demo hardware Cr, started to work properly.
It's currently on a six-week update cycle. Google has also leveraged its successes in other departments to benefit the Chrome OS. Google's notorious for not always having good integration between its services, so this -- and solid Google Play integration for Books, Movies, and Music -- are welcome improvements.
Also welcome is Google's decision to expand everybody's Google Drive to GB when it detects a Chromebook associated with your account. When you take a screenshot using the Ctrl-Next Window button, for example, you'll find it saved locally via the File Browser.
Famously, Google has killed the Caps Lock key and replaced it with a dedicated Search key. Tap it and a new tab will open, with the cursor ready in the location bar. What's less well-known is that you can remap the Search key to Caps Lock, and that Google makes it easy to do through the Settings menu under System, then Modifier keys. Here you can modify the bindings of the Control and Alt keys as well.
But also missing is a dedicated Delete key to remove characters to the right of the cursor. The default settings for the hot keys are among the best things about the Chrome OS.
Hold down Ctrl and Alt with the question mark key to bring up a color-coded map of combinations that you can use. The map and colors change depending on which key -- Shift, Control, or Alt -- you're pressing.
Google is to be commended for building an operating system that goes from sleep to fully functional in what feels like a second. There's simply no lag time, and the updates have fixed previous lagginess in logging in and out. Your Chromebook or Chromebox may just be the fastest PC you've used when it comes to booting, shutting down, and logging in and out. Two other low-profile but well-executed features in Chrome are autoupdating and translation.
Chrome automatically updates when a new version comes out. This makes it harder to revert back to an older version, but it's highly unlikely that you'll want to downgrade this build of Chrome since this is the stable build and not the beta or developer's version. You can toggle the build among the three under About Chrome. The second feature, automatic translation of Web pages, is available to other browsers as a Google add-on, but because it comes from Google, it's baked directly into Chrome.
Already mentioned a little bit, the biggest OS hang-up in the operating system is offline support despite the improvements. Chrome OS will support the core Google apps of Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs offline, but for most of your other apps, you'll be left in the dark.
That might not be an issue on the Chromebox, Google's answer to the Mac Mini, but for the portable Chromebooks, prepare for a severely hamstrung experience. Anyone outside of the cloud crowd likely won't be comfortable with it. You can print with Google Cloud Print, accessible via the common printing hot-key combo of Control-P.
Google has anticipated the problems that still plague cloud printing, and so it offers instructions on how to do it. Still, most people will probably find the process way too fiddly because what's simple to print off a basic Windows 7 Netbook will take effort to set up properly from a Chromebook. Cloud Print does now come with access to FedEx stores in the United States, which is a nice improvement for remote printing.
Google says that security will not be a big concern in Chrome OS and that it's the most secure operating system ever shipped. There are some toggles via about:flags and the Settings menu that will allow you to restrict content that requires plug-ins. Cookies, image management, JavaScript, plug-ins, pop-ups, location information, and notifications can be adjusted from the Content Settings button.
Google is basing most of its claim of a secure operating system on a new feature in Chrome OS called "verified boot. Performance The following benchmarks are of the original version of the Chrome OS that shipped on the Cr There have been significant improvements since then, and CNET will update the results below as soon as possible.
Benchmarking the first beta of the Chrome OS proved to be a bit tricky. It's hard to measure the impact of various essential programs, such as a productivity suite or media player, on the operating system because they exist largely in the cloud. However, because the operating system is also the browser, we were able to run browser benchmark tests against it and compare them against the same version of Google Chrome, but running on a Windows 7 laptop.
These tests are admittedly not a direct apples-with-apples comparison. Google has not yet released the specifications of the Cr, saying only that it's running an Intel Atom processor.
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